African-American literature

Finney, who started writing poetry at age 10
and was later influenced and encouraged by BLACK
ARTS MOVEMENT writers NIKKI GIOVANNI, LUCILLE
CLIFTON, TONI CADE BAMBARA, and JOHN O. KIL-
LENS, is the author of two collections of poems:
On Wings Made of Gauze (1985) and The World
Is Round (2003). Rice (1995), her collection of
poems, stories, and photographs, won the PEN
American Open Book Award in 1999. Finney has
also published a collection of short stories, Heart-
wood (1998).
A visionary whose life has been that of bearing
witness to the human condition, Finney seeks to
“anchor her words” in one central idea throughout
her work, whether she writes about her parents,
family, childhood memory, slavery, or lesbian-
ism: “I truly believe, as James Baldwin said, that
in the New Jerusalem, we really can be better as a
people and a society” (Preston, 1E). “It is not my
job to make people feel comfortable,” Finney has
said, “but to keep the human race aware of what it
is doing to itself ” (Johnson, 1C). She successfully
calls attention to the continuation of oppression
in America after the emancipation in the title and
images of “The Running of the Bulls”:

After slavery there were other chains.

The South still rounded up Black men

who wouldn’t look the other way,

drop eyes or chin,

pass or step aside,

or be cheated. (The World Is Round)

In “Fishing among the Learned,” Finney, an
associate professor of creative writing at the Uni-
versity of Kentucky, digs deep within her fam-
ily treasure and takes a page from the important
lessons she learned from her grandmother, who
fished with no more than a “five and dime pole
in her hand,” to explore and define her own chal-
lenges and commitment in the academic world:

A poet needs to flyfish

in order to catch glimpses of privileged in-

formation

that there are too many meetings

and not enough conversations going on

I stand before the listening eyes

of those who pay their hard earned money

to wonder if i am teaching anything

that the world will later ask of them.

In 1994, Finney won the Publisher’s Marketing

Association’s Benjamin Franklin Award for The

World Is Round. The award honors “the finest title

within the independent publishing world.” Phil

Hall, one of the judges, wrote that The World is

Round “was not only the best of the competition,

but it is easily among the best poetry books in re-

cent years” (39). He called the collection “an aston-

ishing meditation on the severity of and occasional

epiphanies that mark the human experience” (39).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Finney, Nikky. “Fishing among the Learned.” Univer-

sity of Kentucky, August 31, 1994.

———. The World Is Round. Atlanta: Innerlight Pub-

lishing, 2003.

Hall, Phil. “Spin the World.” New York Resident, 21

June 2003, p. 39.

Johnson, Erika. “A Woman of Great Pluck.” The

ITEM, 5 September 1993, pp. 1C–2C.

Preston, Rohan. “Nikky Finney.” The Star Tribune.

Wilfred D. Samuels

Fire!! (1926)

During the summer of 1926, while still affiliated

with The MESSENGER, WALLACE THURMAN, along

with ZORA NEALE HURSTON, Aaron Douglas, John

P. Davis, BRUCE NUGENT, Gwendolyn Bennett, and

LANGSTON HUGHES, established a new black pub-

lication for the arts called Fire!!. This name, they

thought, was appropriate for a “quarterly dedi-

cated to the younger Negro artists,” for it was the

intention of these young artists to “burn up a lot

of the old, dead conventional Negro-white ideas of

the past, epater le bourgeois into a realization of the

existence of the younger Negro writers and artists

while providing them with an outlet for publica-

tion” (Hughes, 233–234). This journal was in-

tended, in many ways, to offer an alternative view

to the cultural blossoming that was taking place in

Fire!! 18 3